Kairos; or, Sun Tzu the Rhetor

Sun Tzu, master of military strategy, wrote in his seminal work The Art of War "He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight". Of course, rhetoric is not a military art, but it is still strategic (i.e., it involves assessing one's circumstances systematically and identifying what to do to reach some goal) and so this advice still holds true. If we reinterpret this statement along rhetorical lines, we might summarize it by saying that no rhetor will be successful unless they speak (or write) their message at the optimal time. In fact, given this rephrasing, we could easily say that Sun Tzu was talking about the military equivalent of the rhetorical concept of kairos.

Kairos is a Greek concept that is roughly equivalent to the English word timing. It means possessing the right confluence of current trends and events as well as audience beliefs to convince an audience of a concept. An argument without good kairos will inevitably fail, while a well-timed argument has a far better chance of being effective.

It is very easy to come up with a topic that has good kairos at the moment. Simply turning on the news will reveal topics, such as net neutrality and gun control, about which highly kairotic arguments can be made. It is far more useful, however, to consider topics about which kairotic argument is impossible.

Imagine, for a moment, that I wrote an essay arguing about why absolute monarchy was a better form of government than constitutional monarchy. Since this is a settled question, almost no one would even bother to read the essay after hearing its subject matter, and anyone not acutely interested in historical politics would not care enough to continue reading past its first or second page. No matter what words I chose, the total lack of kairos around the topic of the ideal form of monarchy would make my argument fall on deaf ears.

Now imagine that, through time travel and a very good translator, I had the essay published in France in 1788. At that moment in history, the debate between absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, or republic was the topic of the day (and, indeed, would continue to be for the next decade). As a result, my audience would likely find the essay compelling (assuming that I wrote it well) because its subject matter was at the forefront of almost all of the educated minds in France.

Through this example we can see how vital kairos is to an argument. Improper timing causes the audience to be disinterested in the speaker, which precludes any possibility of rhetorical success. Much as Sun Tzu said, the rhetor who does not know when to speak is doomed to failure, but one who understands kairos can rest assured of success.